This is a nonsense reply that doesn't address what I actually said.
388 karma · joined October 23, 2010
Yes, it would be better if SAR services were never needed, but they serve the public, it's not the public that serves SAR when they decide to step outside.
It'd be one thing if McCandless were willingly and flagrantly putting his life in danger with the expectation that he could dial a number and be rescued at any time - but that didn't happen did it? He played it out to the end starving to death.
McCandless didn't ask for a book to be written about him. Why should anyone care one way or another that an individual they didn't know decided to do something for his own sake with little effect on anyone else.
If I, or anyone, decide tomorrow they'd like to take a very long walk in the woods and not return for six months, why does society at large need to weigh in on that? It's not a question of moral or ethics. People are consistently smug, morally prescriptive, and hindsight-ridden whenever the topic of McCandless comes up.
Not everyone on the "left" is on board with this. There's still a large number of us who respect reason, intelligence, civil discourse, liberty. We just don't appear to have a candidate who represents us, or a late night talk show that represents us, because our stances are not principally rooted as being in opposition to other entities. There are a few journalists and voices that still speak and write foremost with respect to reason and in accordance to reality, but the current social and political climate is so inflammatory that this becomes difficult.
People like us exist, our existence is just not expressed majorly in media or social media.
Have you ever felt constrained by your selection of tools? It appears to me you rely mostly on woodworking tools for your projects. In my own experience I've frequently felt that if I had the capability to mill or turn materials to exact dimensions I could more easily produce better quality tools.
It seems to me that your style of work would naturally lead, at least in part, to using machining tools and metal as material. I'm curious why your path hasn't lead you to transition here.
Thanks!
Text-based representations have tremendous upsides (granularity, easy to input, work with existing tools, easy to parse), but they also have downsides I think people tend to overlook. For example, reading and understanding code, especially foreign code, is quite difficult and involved; involves a lot of concentration, back and forth with API documentation, searching for and following external library calls ad nauseum. Comments help, but only so much. Code is just difficult to read and is expensive in terms of time and attention.
> Text editors and IDEs are not gifted by the universe and are not inherent to programming; they were built.
Bret Victor has some good presentations that addresses this idea. One thing he says is that in the early stages of personal computing, multitudes of ideas flowered that may seem strange to us today. A lot of that was because we were still exploring what computing actually was.
I don't dislike programming in vim/emacs/ides. Is it good enough? Yes, but... is this the final form? I think it'll take a creative mind to create a general-purpose representation to supersede text-based representations. I'm excited. I don't really know of anyone working on this, but I also can't see it not happening.
> When you write text-based code, you are also restricted to 2 dimensions, but it's really more like 1.5 because there is a heavy directionality bias that's like a waterfall, down and across.
These are two really good points. Text-based code is just a constrained version of a visual programming environment. So far most attempts at VP have attempted to represent code in terms of nodes and lines (trees), but that does not necessarily need to be the case.
The interesting about VP is that is presents a way to better map the concept and structure of programming as an abstract concept to how we physically interface with our coding environments.
It's far from likely that character and line-based editing is the mode of the future. Line-editing maps to the reality of programming in, to my eyes, such a limited way that is seems the potential for new interfaces, and modes of representation is wide open.
It's not that, as some people stubbornly say, there's no better alternative to text-based programming, but I think we just haven't conceived of a better way yet. We're biased to think in a certain way because most of us have programmed in a certain way almost solely by text and most of our tools are built to work with text. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the way we've done things is the best way indefinitely.
There's so much unexplored territory. VR opens up new frontiers. What if the concepts of files, lines, workspaces were to map to something else more elemental to programming as an abstract concept. What if we didn't think so much in terms of spacial and physical delineations, and instead something else? Blind programmers have a different idea of what an editor is. Spreadsheet programs "think" in terms of cells in relation to one another. What about different forms of input? Dark Souls can be beaten on a pair of bongos. Smash Bros players mod their controllers because their default mode of input isn't good enough at a high level. Aural and haptic interfaces are unexplored. Guitars and pianos are different "interfaces" to music. Sheet music is not a pure representation of music.
I think there's the mistaken belief that text == code, that text is the most essential form of code. Lines, characters are not the essential form of code. As soon as we've assigned something a variable name, we've already altered our code into a form to assist our cognition. Same with newlines, comments, filenames, the names of statements and keywords. When we program in terms of text, we're already transforming our interpretation of code and programming; we've already chosen and contrained ourselves to a particular palette.
What is the most essential form of code are (depends on the language, but generally) data structures and data flow. So far, our best interpretation of this is in the form of text, lines, characters, inputted by keyboard onto a flat screen - but this is still just one category of interpretation.
All this is to say is that text is not necessarily the one and only way, and it's too soon to say that it's the best way.
I think this says something about Mozilla or large organizations in general.
Well I've decided Amazon isn't for me, for now. I have a dedicated website for my business but I don't know what is the right way to drive traffic.
Could you mind explaining what your approach has been?
Take even just a single part from it, like the chain for example probably represents centuries worth of technology. Each link has to be uniform to operate smoothly on a chainring or sprocket, which indicates some form of mass production.
Chains must be hardened to withstand stress, resist stretching. Soft steel would wear and deform too quickly.
Each link is in itself a complex component composed of a uniform bushing and pin shaped oblong symmetrical down the center and also quite small. It must pivot smoothly.
I doubt there are many people, even skilled people, who could make a complete bicycle from raw metal stock.
>> "If you possess a good eye and steady hand, you should feel compelled to create something that looks pleasing"
Okay.. Goes on to include a big picture of Michelangelo's "David" to suggest that designers should strive to create masterpieces in the same vein...?
>> "People use applications because of their purpose, not because it is pleasing to the eye."
Another baseless generality. The first part is obviously true, but it doesn't follow that people don't care about appearance.
>> "The only time a UI should be updated is if it impacts the ability of a user to actually use your application."
Another unsupported opinion phrased as an absolute.
>> "It hurts retention"
This would have been a natural point to include actual data. Nonetheless the article falls back on making generalizations about people's behavior.
>> "Does it really add up, or are you just giving designers busywork that doesn't amount to anything in the end? Do we have concrete evidence that what we are doing will provide benefit to the company or users, or just feel that it would be better if the UI was redesigned? Take a minute, think about that one."
There's not a single piece of concrete evidence in this entire article.
Most people seemed to have workable skill levels. A pretty good portion of people seemed to still be in the novelty phase of programming where they would be slightly too excited and surprised at themself, and perhaps slightly unconfident, in answering a fairly basic question correctly.
Woodworking is something I don't recommend anyone try to make a living off cold. It gets expensive quick. Woodwork isn't particularly valuable as a skill and almost anything you make can be mass produced.
You'll end up needing more space than you have. You also can't get completely away from the computer either as you'll need to market the things you create.
For anyone even thinking about quitting their job and trying it full time I would recommend having 100k in savings first.
The message is, whether or not it is original (looks to be a no), is how he and his partner managed to succeed in launching the product and earning millions in revenue.
I take it that most people here aren't developing, launching, and marketing their own products and creating a company out of it, and don't really care about learning anything from the article.
People in general, but especially anonymous people on the internet are more interested in calling fraud, and telling you why you have no right to success.
I see the same thing on /r/entrepreneurs, MMA forums, YouTube comments, and here. Doesn't matter how hard you worked or how successful you are, even if you're the top fighter in the world who trained for a decade taking hundreds of blows to the head - people will make sideways excuses for themselves by shitting on you.
Meanwhile reality asserts itself and this guy and his partner has made millions by themselves and have established their own independence.
And the takeaway from HN is "My grandma used this 3 decades ago," and "I don't like the text and phrasing on his website."
I feel healthy now and can walk, run, have excellent mobility. No more sciatic pain, some tightness in the lumbar if I'm careless.
I don't squat or deadlift at all anymore and focus more on calisthenics (pullups, pushups). I do a lot of running and it doesn't bother me.
But for those three years, things were dark. I brooded almost every day on my injury.
In a sense the vast majority of us are a drain on society at small and large. The people doing the work of growing food, maintaining and building infrastructure, providing medical care, pursuing scientific advancement are a small number. My sense is that most people living in developed countries are doing so on the backs of others. It's easy to point at homeless and say they need to "earn their way," but did we really "earn" that car or earn that house. Did you "earn" your vaccinations. In the sense that you purchased it, did you earn it. How much did sitting in an office or stacking bricks or breaking concrete go towards actually earning the invention of that piston engine or the discovery of the measles vaccine? How much does the effort of sitting in a cubicle translate to the effort of constructing a house or growing a garden.
Very little anyone possesses is individually earned. We're all profitting from centuries of technology and advancement we had no part in. The humane thing to do is share what we did not reap with people less advantaged.
So as long as there are societies there will always be people living on the fringes of those societies. There will always be elderly, babies, children, criminals, mentally ill, physically handicapped, low income earners, etc. Nonetheless those people are also apart of society. Supporting people on the fringe is an act society does to support itself.
Some other points:
"Moving" without a car is not so simple. You can hitchhike, with the success of that depending on how you're able to present yourself and the culture of the local area. You can walk, but only so long as the nearest places are spaced in small distances, and if not you would need overnight gear. The weather is also a major factor here.
Knowing where to go is also another factor. Even for someone with a phone and internet it can be a challenge. First there's so many places. But how would you know that where you're going is any better than the place you're at? It represents a gamble that could result in you depleting already limited resources without any gain. Even if your current area is expensive at least you already know where the community food pantries are located, where and from who to get free/inexpensive clothing, good places to stealth camp... Moving to a completely new area puts you in a place of zero knowledge in exchange for only the possibility of finding work.
There is a hump you have to crest to acquire long-term housing. You need (depending on where you live) at least several hundred dollars to put in a security deposit. You need several hundred more to cover the next few months of rent. You need a job. You need to feel secure that you'll still have that job in a few months or at least have a replacement ready. You probably need a vehicle. You need for it to be dependable. You need to be presentable before being able to acquire that job. You might need references for either the job or apartment. You might need some sort of rental history.
Not to mention if you've been living on the edge for years it might have changed you. For some people it puts on them a character of supreme humbleness, for others it makes them very outwardly resentful against those who apparently have so much. Sometimes those changes are too visible to hide and in a way frames you to people living in normal and casual society as "other."
Getting over that hump when you have next to nothing is difficult.
The only ones benefitting are overpaid tech workers supplanting people that do actual tangible work that makes the city tick.
Funny that a tech worker posting on the HN playground is addressing people who deal with real life struggles (raising a family, making increasing rent) how to be a "responsible adult."
You can see quite a bit more like the Adirondacks you're willing to drive 5-6 hours, but a drive like that isn't suitable for a day hike.
You can also find some smaller trails and untended areas on the outskirts of the city (eg, Marine Park in southeast Brooklyn). But these tend to be.. well small.
Anyway my point is, like most big cities, it's difficult to really get "outdoors" with any measure of convenience.
Where do you even begin to make that sort of claim?
One or more SEVERED FINGERS absolutely does justify an emergency response like calling for an ambulance. You know, "severed finger?" Meaning a finger that's been detached, ripped ragged, caught from it's bone and pulled off - that's what a severed finger is.
People in here are seriously arguing that it doesn't merit a call to an ambulance. As if a person in that situation is going to deduce the pros and cons of the situation at the time.
Common sense is too often a stranger here. Logic can take you far, but as in the case of this thread, much too far out.
The games that we love from the past exist. And spiritual remakes of those games exist. It's not enough for a game to succeed based largely on nostalgia. I don't mean to discredit the creator's hard work. This is what I understand from a glance at seeing the preview video.